Page 134 of Bulletproof

I took a quivering breath. “Spit it out.”

“Dane will⁠—”

“Dane hates delivering bad news as much as you do, and it’s not fair to make him.”

“It’s not that. I just want him here for you.”

“I have you. I don’t need anybody else to hold me up.”

He nodded and took my hand. “Okay, so there was trauma to your spine, and they think it’s okay, but spines are tricky, and right now, as it stands, you can’t walk.”

I had not tried to get up. I’d had a catheter in me, I was hurt, and I had not even thought about moving. But now I was thinking about it.

“What are you doing?”

I was trying to do anything—wiggle my toes, lift my leg, or bend my knees—but there was nothing. I was dead below the waist.

“J?”

I absorbed everything he’d said.

“Baby.”

“Lemme think.”

“Okay.”

I cleared my throat. “So, maybe I’ll be fine.”

“Yep, it could just be when you wanna walk, you will. They don’t know. They can’t tell.”

“Did they do surgery on my spine?”

“No, but it was compressed in a way that there was no blood, and I guess it needs that, just like your brain.”

“But there’s no actual spinal cord injury.”

“There is and isn’t.”

“That’s crap.”

“That’s medicine.”

“Explain.”

“Right now, you’re in what they call spinal shock, and it can take up to two months for all the fluid and swelling to go down so they can really figure out how bad the injury is.”

“Okay.”

“Your doctor, she’s good, and she thinks if you have a spinal cord injury, the one you have is posterior cord syndrome.”

“And?”

“And if you have to get one, that’s a good one ’cause it’s not as bad as some of the other ones. It’s what they call an incomplete spinal cord injury, not the total never walk again version.”

“So, even if I have it, I could get better.”

“If you think of your injury on a scale of A through E⁠—”